THE INTERATOMIC POTENTIAL OF ARGON

The recent literature abounds with proposed interatomic potential functions for argon. Of these the Hartree-Fock dispersion (HFD) type functions have been very successful and are considered to be among the best characterizations of the argon interaction to date. It is the purpose of this Letter, however, to show that of the proposed HFD-type potentials, none predict the recent acoustic virial coefficients measured by Moldover et al. In view of this an alternative interatomic potential has been constructed for argon. The potential is of the Hartree-Fock dispersion individually damped (HFD-ID) type and represents a subtle but significant improvement for the interaction.